A Short Story About Love
by Meresger
Summary: Years of grief and deception culminate with a journey. Rated for language. Genre also adventure/romance. (Swanfire)
1. The Witching Hour

Title: A Short Story About Love

Disclaimer: I don't own _Once Upon A Time_. If I did, Adam  & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway.

Summary: Years of grief and deception culminate with a journey. Rated for language. Genre also adventure/romance. (Swanfire)

Author's Note: This is what happens when a weird _Once Upon A Time_ dream that clearly plagerizes _Game of Thrones_ and _Pirates of the Carribean_ demands to be written down. Sorry in advance for the heavy use of expositional narrative and presense of a certain pirate mascot. It's kind of weird tense-wise, mostly written in present and some present progressive tense. The title is taken from the _Fringe_ episode "A Short Story About Love". Where my Cortexifans at?

* * *

 **A Short Story About Love**

CHAPTER ONE

THE WITCHING HOUR

It's night, what Emma might have called The Witching Hour before she believed in the existence of witches thanks to one who'd altered the course of her future forever. She isn't certain of what has woken her this night, but rather than try to get back to sleep, she slips from bed and the arms of her lover to perch on a chair by the window. There she wraps herself up in one of those mass-produced Pottery Barn afghans that might pass for a family heirloom from Grandma if most every sitcom in the past thirty years hadn't include it over the back of the couch.

Emma feels about as fraudulent as the blanket, meant to look special and unique, but in truth she considers herself just another pretender.

Usually it's the nightmares that wake her, heart hammering, breath short. No one knows the true horrors of her time as the Dark One, what it was like to have that insidious voice in her head. Well, that isn't true, but she's never going to have coffee with Rumplestiltskin to talk about it.

Worse than the nightmares are the happy dreams, the "what might have been" fantasies that never could be. Sometimes Neal never leaves her and Henry is born in Tallahassee with a different name but the same steadfast devotion to family and precarious curiosity. Other times she finds a way to save Neal from the price of the Vault and though it isn't easy, they find their way back to each other and all of the pain and hurt and fear that had kept her heart closed to him is melted away by the possibility of Tallahassee. Emma wakes from those dreams in tears, her heart aching as though on fire, and she flees from the warm sheets and body beside her, because that restore potential for darkness wants to hurt the man she's given her heart to.

In the dark of night, Emma acknowledges that she has settled for an easy option, because she doesn't want to be alone. And with the secrets that have come out since she first kissed one Captain Hook, since she said those three words you can't take back to _Killian_ , she finds herself hating him and loathing herself for staying with him. There's an irrational and cruel desire to take that arm slung over his head, moonlight setting the word "Milah" in sharp contrast to his skin, and use a bolt of magic to remove the hand that has pleasured both her and the mother of her first love - and then repeat the process with the hand she restored to him before learning the deep and dark secrets he kept from her, actions and choices she often thinks he doesn't even consider wrong.

But she doesn't.

And when daylight returns, pushing back the shadows in which she finds clarity, she will bury it all away and pretend that the true love they shared that helped save her didn't burn bright and fast like a match, leaving them with nothing but ashes. Gone are the days when she thought something better and stronger would rise from those ashes. They will never be her parents, no matter what Killian thinks as he prides himself on extolling some delusional virtues of how he won her heart and their one-true-love-ness. They will instead remain, like Regina and Robin, some corrupted carbon copy playing life out as though they were destined, as though destiny is forever instead of about untwinable moments when two people might be soulmates, before they head off on separate paths, become so very different from those people that any kind of true love after that between them is simply a desperate delusion to regain what was lost.

Magic doesn't seem to know the difference.

As wind blows through the trees, making the shadows dance, Emma considers that isn't always true. People don't always change so much that they can't find one another again. She and Neal had a chance, an understanding, a kismet that was still there and might have grown again into an active love instead of remaining this dormant thing in her heart, carried around for over a decade, just as it had been with her son.

It hurts the most that Henry will never really know his father. From her own childhood as an orphan, she understands that grief for children comes in moments, with each "first" that is experienced alone instead of with those who should be there to share in it. She has tried to be both mother and father, but she knows that's impossible, particularly little as she knew about Neal in that final decade of his life.

She sees the flicker of grief and anger in Henry's eyes sometimes when Killian seamlessly and carelessly inserts himself into moments in which, however "together" they are, he should know that he is not and never will be welcome. There's a sociopathy to the former pirate that she ignored in favor of the distracting passion and to which she became complacent, the better he learned to read her - but he has never quite figured out Henry, and in its those moments his true nature is revealed.

She isn't blinded by passion anymore.

Passion always fades, revealing the flaws that once were hidden by its blinding glow.

And when she ponders them on nights like this, Emma thinks there's more than enough reason to leave him. Sometimes she even takes a mental inventory of all the things she will pack and where she will go.

There's a rotting little house on the beach she discovered near Elsa's cave, and she thinks about how she would spend a year fixing it up, with Henry's help, and they'd paint it Bug Yellow and have a solarium filled with plants like their apartment in Manhattan. She even has magazines that she skims at work sometimes, dog-earing pages of interiors and gardens.

But she'll do neither of those things. She'll stay with him and let the cottage fall apart, forgotten, until perhaps one day her dreams will fade away as well, washed into the sea with the termite-eaten porch and weather-worn clapboards.

Relationships are about a journey, not an ending, her parents like to say, but Emma knows that's a lie people tell themselves to keep from admitting that they've wasted precious time on something that never should have been. And to keep from dealing with tragic endings, because if she learned anything from Regina's experience with Tinkerbell, it's that grief is a taboo in the world of her birth, akin to a disease that must be either conquered swiftly with a stiff upper lip or smothered by the introduction of new love. You can't have a happily ever after or even a happy beginning if you're so busy focusing on the part of your heart that will always belong to the one you lost that you miss the opportunity to sacrifice another chunk on some frivolity with the potential to become true love. There's some truth to it, but it's all so warped and twisted, based upon such ridiculous fallacies about love and relationships and misogynist ideologies, that any kernel of truth in that philosophy is undermined by the fairy tale fantasy delusions.

Such has become her life, Emma thinks. If you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em, and so she has embraced their crazy.

Eventually, she thinks, she'll forget the little yellow house in her dreams that's filled with love and laughter. Eventually, it will be no more and she'll have accepted this life, imperfect as it is, perhaps even convinced herself that finding a happy ending in "as good as it gets" isn't the biggest betrayal of all.

The sound of rustling sheets pulls her from those depressing thoughts, and turning her gaze from the moonlight catching on the brittle strands of the dreamcatcher, Emma meets the heavily-lipped eyes of her lover. His hair is wild and a shadow of stubble on his jaw adds to his physical attractiveness... his sole virtue that was enough to seduce her but would hardly be enough to keep her if there was a better option. Or if the truth was that she didn't want a better option.

"Luv, come back to bed," he calls, voice rough, and in a cadence intended to be sexy, so ingrained is that lethario habit in him after three centuries of tricking bar maidens into bed.

Emma tries not to think about that, to ponder how much a person changing away from criminality for such selfish reasons as to claim her heart can actually, if at all, atone for three hundred years of doing terrible, unspeakable things. In the light of day she can explain away his villainy as the haze of a broken heart and vengeance, but she has been brokenhearted, and she has the capacity for great evil, but she would never do what he did or continually place the blame on others, say he was being used by a bigger evil than his own to rebrand his actions as the desperation of a victim.

She knows that her words to that effect have encouraged the delusion in Killian, made him believe himself to be redeemed and a hero, but in the light of day she needs him to be those things, because The Savior cannot be with a villain and it is her job to save everyone, to make them better and get them happiness whether or not its deserved.

At night it's different. In the growing shadows Emma needs him to be the monster he truly is, that she sees in him even if he is blind to his own twisted and ugly reflection now. She needs to feel dirty and she needs to be hurt. She needs him to be rough and dominate her, make her forget that there was ever a time in her life when sex and emotion were one. Killian never complains, of course.

She knows that in the daylight it grates on him that she is the one with power, that it drives him to the frequent distraction of blatantly disregarding her authority even if his own plan of action is some half-assed nonsense sure to get him and others nearly killed, just because his chauvinist sensibilities cannot allow him to be cowed by a woman. And so, she lets him think that he has the control in their bed, in the physical side of their romance as he "seduces" her with his pretty face, flowery words, and his "sword".

Emma doesn't even feel bad that he is so easily fooled, which, perhaps, doesn't say much for the state of her moral compass... any more than it says for his, she supposes.

They have now been lovers long enough that Emma doubts Killian has ever _made love_ to anyone, despite his belief otherwise in his dear sweet Milah. But Emma reasons it impossible that two utterly unempathetic people could do anything more than copulate for the purpose of the endorphin rush and the egotistical high of being the one to bring someone else to the heights of ecstasy.

And so that's what they do.

Emma slips back into bed, and he slips into her, and she lets him be the man he can never be during the day when he is just the "pirate mascot" consort of The Savior. She cries out his name and she bites his lip until she tastes blood, and he chuckles that she is a saucy little pirate wench, makes some crude joke about always knowing she had a little - or not so little tonight - pirate in her. It's not remotely as romantic or clever as he thinks, but she laughs and kisses him, that all-passion-without-sweetness kiss that so pathetically defines them.

Then she rolls over, imagining that the arm laying heavy on her hip and the callused fingers tracing patterns on her thigh belong to another.

Before a dreamless sleep claims her, Emma wonders which one of them is truly the villain.

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AN: Hook. It's still Hook.

 **Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**


	2. The Doctor

**CHAPTER TWO**

 **THE DOCTOR**

Baby fever has hit Storybrooke. Emma is not entirely surprised given her mother is more obsessed with setting up couples and encouraging the overpopulation of Storybrooke than an old spinster matchmaker in the "Old World", which is actually how they refer to The Enchanted Forest while ostensibly trying to find some way back there that doesn't involve a calamity or leaving Henry behind.

Both her mother and Aurora are heavily pregnant again and with Belle expecting twins and Regina parading her ginger-haired niece-slash-daughter around in fancy-ass strollers, it's only a matter of time before everyone starts looking at Emma like something's wrong - and then _asking her intrusively_ if something is wrong.

Children aren't something she and Killian ever discussed, and it's been fairly obvious from both his past in Neverland and how he acts around her brother and Henry that he both dislikes babies and young children and has no clue how to interact with older ones other than to taunt them or preen in front of them in what she suspects is some complex from having an absent father and a bully for an older brother. That, and the sociopathy thing. Emma supposes Regina got enough experience in raising Henry from birth to be able to fake that particular brand of selfless love with comic books and jointly run operations as part of her "redemption" arc. Henry's adoptive mother at least puts in the effort to pretend she's trying for the Kid's benefit rather than to impress, and so Emma supposes she ought to respect the woman a bit for putting the "functional" in her psychopath after decades of just being bat-shit-crazy-evil.

She supposes that she has to respect all of her family for either being heroes or recovering villains. At least, that seems to be her required role as Savior. She does love them to various degrees, not always for the healthiest of reasons, though. And respect and love doesn't means she wants to contribute to adding more serial-killer-type genes to the pool. Between an unapologetic date rapist baby daddy and having a grandmother who let a rapist run free to get her spoiled ass on a throne, there's probably a good genetic chance that their combined DNA pops out a more attractive and sexually deviant version of Zelena. The peer pressure is unrelenting, however.

Stuck between the rock of her 1950's values minded family and the hard place of being the odd one out as she has been most of her life, Emma caves under the pressure. Which doesn't mean that she falls in lockstep. Her potential for darkness, after all, is back in place, and that has brought with it an ease at deception that is at once disturbing and welcoming when surrounded by a family half populated by psychopaths.

Emma takes a page from their stories: lies and deceit, with a side of self-loathing.

It's a moonless night when she's supposed to be out on patrol that Emma ends up in the cemetery with none other than Doctor Frankestein for a bought of grave robbing. Or grave contents borrowing, rather. She tells herself that she isn't going to look, but she knows that's a lie even before the coffin is levitated out of the ground. Her heart aches and her stomach feels full of lead, because Neal looks like he's simply asleep, preserved by the spell Regina used on Daniel. She's seen dead bodies - saw _his dead body_ \- and the dead aren't meant to look simply slumbering. The dead should look altogether wrong, devoid of whatever it is that had made them a person instead of a corpse. Emma thinks that Neal would be disgusted to be preserved this way, that he would cite it as evidence for how unnatural magic is.

But she was weak then.

She still is.

Emma doesn't watch as Dr. Whale does his thing, after which the coffin is returned, the ground above it restored as though it was never touched; and then she returns home to spend the rest of the night throwing up... where Killian finds her and leaps to the conclusion that she's pregnant.

She doesn't deny the possibility.

A week later, Emma has a "prenatal" appointment and she stares up at the fiberboard ceiling, counting the holes, the final procedure almost complete, which she can almost convince herself is just a regular pelvic exam, accept for it ending rather beginning with her being forced to lay there for an hour, waiting... and the whole having a progesterone suppository shoved up her hoo-ha.

When Whale finally lets her up, it's with another set of needles and vials for self-injection and an appointment scheduled for two weeks to do a pregnancy test.

And so she goes home, lies to Killian that she's pregnant, and is relieved that the pelvic exam allows at least some truth in avoiding the activity that he considers, along with alcohol, the only real form of celebration.

That night, she refuses to feel guilty and holds her cheap convenience store keychain tight, praying despite a lack of real faith, that something good can come out of being with the man she chose instead of the one she was meant to be with.

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AN: How the hell did Regina put that preservation spell on Daniel's body years before she met Jefferson and Frankenstein? In that flashback, she was utterly shocked when she was able to actually do magic, something she'd actively rejected up to that point. Is it a massive plothole or do you just pour a potion or pixie dust on a corpse to keep it minty fresh and resurrectable for decades?


	3. The Birth

**CHAPTER THREE**  
 **THE BIRTH**

Her daughter is born in the very same bed that saw her brought into the world. Emma screams and curses and demands to the answer of no one why she has to be stuck in this medieval nightmare world instead of the home she desperately misses but can never bring herself to tell her parents.

She knows Dr. Whale feels the same, trapped in yet another world not his own, but more backwards than even the one he was born into. He is her coconspirator in this and the need of some medical supplies to an Ogre-caused refugee camp several kingdoms away sent Killian aboard the _Jolly Roger_ , and though the ship is fast, it's not fast enough to make it in time when she made magically sure her mother's letter was delayed, the dove traveling far off course with an enchantment until the child was already arrived and held in her arms.

Swaddled in that big purple scarf of Neal's that with a bit of magic still smells like him, Emma has a few precious moments with his child. She couldn't bring a lot not made in this world when they "moved", but a variety of spells were used to allow Henry to come with them, and she'd tucked it and a few other things, like the dreamcatcher, into his bag. She has his cape too, from this world, that was left behind when he was "absorbed" by Rumplestiltskin - something she tries not think about - and given as a gift by Belle, the only one she thinks suspects the truth; the brainy brunet has never asked or given any indication of passing judgment.

Emma knows that the rest of her family would, and so this short time is all she will have with her daughter as she truly is - with her father's big brown eyes and a mop of unruly brown tufts. Her eyes will become blue like the sky, her hair like golden straw, her skintone a shade lighter as well - some sort of obscure magic that Lily was given by The Apprentice to alter her in such a way that she was able to stalk Emma for ten years without being recognized. And so Emma takes this time to memorize Charley's features while telling her all about the father who would have loved her so much and given her all of the encouragement and opportunities that seem to be so severely lacking in the men of this world.

Charley won't get them from Killian, that much she knows. He wants a boy, a male heir to usurp Henry's place, a _legitimate son_ , and her tweaking the magic in her grandmother's pendant assured an inaccurate prediction. Any further attempts at a son will be thwarted by the infertility potion taken from Cora's spellbook until enough time has passed that her family gives up on the idea of her joining the herd of princess brood mares.

Zelena may have been bat-shit crazy from the womb, but she was completely right when she claimed the lot of them are delusional fake feminists buying into the patriarchal model of a woman's happiness being defined by a man and children. The sad truth of it is, that in their desperation to pretend that the Stepford Wife model is somehow healthy, they end up binding themselves to selfish losers through children they raise through a messed up combination of impossible expectations and emotional neglect that she can already see impacting upon her brother and his age-mates with personality traits that will result in yet another generation of selfish royals who think happiness magically trickles down to the peasants from their own like fairy dust... instead of championing any kind of social or economic reforms and activism.

She doesn't understand how her parents, a former shepherd and ex-bandit, can sit in their dining hall every night feasting on the finest food this land has to offer, waited on by servants hand and foot, and never seem to consider that the excess is taking away from those they once lived amongst as commoners. Killian certainly doesn't care, and for all of his outcry against an authoritarian monarch three centuries ago, he gloats over his life in the lap of luxury like a preening peacock, happy to have gotten himself a princess, and who cares about the rest when life is a competition and if you're given a bad hand to live in a mud hut, well that's just fate.

Emma really hates fate.

She hates that everything good or bad is so easily justified as fate rather than free will.

She hates the possibility of its existence even more, of being stuck in some wheel of destiny, heading toward a certain end no matter how much you fight against it.

Her little princess, her 'fuck you' to fate, cries and fusses, little hands kneading her makeshift blanket like a kitten and Emma swallows back tears at what could have been. What _should_ have been. This child should have been conceived in a celebrated love, instead of a secret and posthumous one involving a cold hospital room and a man who is literally the originator of the term "mad scientist". Charley should have been held in her father's arms instead of a scratchy old scarf that will go back in the bottom of a box of momentos. She should grow up loved and appreciated irregardless of sex, instead of growing up to find herself wanting in the eyes of the man duped into thinking he sired a daughter he wasn't expecting.

She will be named not for a song that defined a summer of love and dreams of home, but for an alias and a fraudulent trip to a ball that destroyed an entire universe and created this version of home in which so very much has gone wrong.

It isn't fair to either of them what she's done. Neither is it fair to Henry, who'll never know that he has a full sibling; in spite of his claims otherwise, she knows her son will feel slighted on his father's behalf that she's sharing with his stepfather what he never got with either of his birth parents. Perhaps most of all, it's unfair to Neal, to whom she made a promise she has been unable to keep.

But how can there be Tallahassee without him?

* * *

AN: I have a suspicion the show will conclude with everyone back in Fairy Tale Land. Unfortunately. That place is a fucking mess with terribly backward concepts of justice and love that should be burned to the ground.


	4. The Fall

**CHAPTER FOUR**

 **THE FALL**

It happens on Charley's eighth birthday, the fall that leaves her badly broken and unconscious.

Emma sits at her daughter's bedside as one of the rudimentary healers who was made a nurse in Storybrooke tries another poultice to reduce the fever and swelling. Magic _could_ heal this, Rumplestiltskin conceded, but magic's price is always highest when using it to fight mortality. Look what had transpired of her mother splitting her heart to outwit magic's required sacrifice? Instead of Emma stopping Zelena, she lost her magic and a universe was destroyed... not that her parents will ever see it that way, of course.

Or see the parallel in using magic here, when Rapunzel's parents used magic to cure her of a terminal disease, magic soon after killed her older brother. Because they are special, their family always different and better and protected by beneficent gods.

But magic does not take kindly to mortals who try to act as gods, expecting that ambition and cleverness or virtue and compassion can exempt them of the consequences for violating natural laws.

It weighs on Emma that given magic preserved Neal's body and made what would otherwise have been impossible possible - _this_ might be the price.

Or maybe it's just the natural law of gravity that's to blame here.

If only Charley hadn't climbed that tower...

If only her mother hadn't found Charley drawing in the solarium and insisted she needed to get outside. There's no way she ran off during hide-and-seek to climb that tower without _some_ kind of bullying to spur her on. Charley has Neal's interest in more solitary pursuits without that carefree nature. She's an introvert like Emma with the awkwardness that had often gotten her bullied as a child, but lacking the hereditary skills of a warrior to fight back. It makes her a target for Emma's brother and sister who are not the kindest of children, something her parents refuse to see.

By the time Dr. Whale arrives with the setting sun, Charley's condition is grim, and he declares that she needs surgery for internal bleeding and to reset broken bones before sepsis sets in, if it hasn't already. She'll likely need a transfusion, or least there is a risk of hemorrhage. Prenatal testing back in Storybrooke already told that Emma's then unborn child, like her son, did not share her blood type and so he selects Henry as a donor after rejecting Killian's offer, based on the vertigo he's been recovering from since his last naval assignment.

It's the nurse assisting Whale who interjects, "But, Doctor, Henry does not have the same blood type as Mr. Jones."

Frowning at the nurse, the Doctor insists, "You're mistaken. I treated them both in Storybrooke."

"I handled all of the charting," she presses and goes into some medical-ease rant about blood typing and prenatal tests, following up with, "And regardless, while he was cuffed to a bed in the ER, you joked that his blood type was his only positive redeeming quality."

"Hey, that's right," David recalls, "We all took bets on whether or not you could stick 'hepatitis' before the 'A'."

Other than an annoyed look from Killian at the comment, there's a round of confused looks from everyone, trying to sort out the inconsistencies.

"Well, someone has to be remembering something wrong," groans Henry.

"Or," interjects Regina with a smirking expression, "someone is lying."

"Why would someone lie about a blood type?" asks Robin, bewildered.

She crosses her arms and declares, "To cover up infidelity, _obviously_."

"Regina!" Snow gasps. "How can you accuse Emma of such a thing?"

" _You_ cheated."

"I was _cursed_!"

"And _she_ was cursed into a union with an infatuated stalker who has a MILF fetish for women in a single family line," Regina huffs, with a sour look at the pirate she'd never warmed toward. "Eventually, common sense must have cleared the fog of passion. I mean, surely," she scoffs, "I can't be the only one that failed to notice the more time Emma spent with Captain Guyliner here, the more she went from being a justice-minded we're-all-family do-gooder who'd do anything for her son to a rules-mean-nothing Rumplestiltskin-is-evil pirate's wench who couldn't get away from Henry fast enough after her time trip to fuck her pirate. She might as well have become a brunet and changed her name to Milah."

"That's unfair," Killian interjects.

Regina snaps back, "Only because she obviously woke up 'round about the time she got knocked up and realized that she'd let her 'true love' transform her into a substitute his first whore. I know what it's like to look in the mirror one day and realize you've turned into a replica of the heartless bitch who fucked your husband first. Of course, I wasn't actually sleeping with my husband when I took a lover on the side..."

"No, you're just sleeping with the man whose wife you killed before your sister also killed her," David points out with a snort and throws a look at Robin, amending, "Who considers it honorable to stay with their rapist who murdered their wife?"

"A lot was happening!" Robin exclaims. "It was confusing!"

""I didn't 'take a lover on the side'," Emma speaks up.

Snow puffs her chest up and gives Regina a sour look. "Just because you can't see that they're true love-"

"But," Emma continues, avoiding her husband's eyes, "Killian isn't Charley's father."

There's complete silence then and looks of disbelief from all save Regina, Whale, and Killian, who's expression is stony and unreadable.

"Emma," Snow utters first, a look of disappointment and confusion finally settling into a desperation to justify the revelation, "if you had too much to drink and had a one night stand... I know you tend to... drink... a lot... instead of dealing with your emotions..."

"You're calling me an alcoholic?" Emma exclaims, " _and_ you're using that to justify a one night stand? Just because you got drunk and slept with Whale-"

"I WAS CURSED!" she huffs. "And that is _not_ the point! Emma, we're all just trying to understand-"

"It wasn't a one night stand," Emma cuts her off. "It wasn't an affair." There's a beat and she can see the wheels turning toward the next most obvious option and rolls her eyes. "It wasn't _that_ either. You think I'd actually have some rapist's child? I may be part of this fucked up family, but I'm not _that_ sick," she says and to Regina and Robin, "and, yeah, look in the mirror sometime. Your marriage is a creepy-as-fuck trainwreck. And maybe you both deserve that, but just wait until your niece-slash-daughter grows up, marries his step-sister-slash-half-sister and goes Mordred your asses!"

Turning toward her parents, she amends, "And what made you even think I wanted another child in the first place?"

That secret seems to shock them even more the first, even baffling Regina enough to kill whatever snide remark was on the tip of her tongue, and it's just another reminder of how different the world is in which these people were raised. Angry, Emma snaps at them all, "None of you get it. Not one of you had kids for the right reasons. And then you neglected the shit out of them. I never wanted to be like you, _any of you_. But you pushed and you nagged and it was abundantly clear that the only way we'd have something even remotely resembling a familial connection was if I stopped trying to do what I wanted and just _gave in_ , because all I ever wanted was a family, and it was just... easier to accept this fake feminist fairy tale bullshit than every day seeing the looks of disappointment and listening to the incessant nagging."

"Why..." David begins, shocked and confused, "didn't you say anything?"

"Why do you think?" Emma sighs, and glances at her mother, shaking her head. "You were there in Neverland, in the Echo Caves. I realized that you were never going to really be my parents, not the way I wanted, no matter what I call you, because I can never be the child you raised. All I had left was to try to be one of your... princess groupies," she says to her mother, "who believes in falling forever in love with strangers and first sight and marrying them even if they're assholes, because, apparently, fate or destiny or some bullshit magic whatever.

"Well, you know what?" she continues, her voice raising, "it isn't fate. And it sucks to wake up one day and realize you don't actually know the person you married, that you were living in a story book delusion that everyone shoved down your throat again and again until you were practically brainwashed. That's what 'true love' is. Or all it has to be. Just... believing you truly love someone. It can be based entirely on lies or denial or pretty much any selfish motivation as long as you convince yourself it's real. Killian needed me to be his one true love or he'd have nothing to live for, so that's a powerful placebo affect. But it's not _really_ love."

It's then that Killian turns away and heads for the door. Emma catches the faint look of hurt on his face, but she doesn't follow, and she's too angry and afraid and exhausted to even really care how hurt he is. Instead, she continues to stare down her parents, amending, "Whatever true love actually is, it's not the altruistic fantasy you all seem to think it is. I had real love and destiny doesn't bend over backwards and smote all of the competition to make it happen. So don't you goddamn lecture me on morality when you treat the sacrificial victims of your perfect soulmate love like some merit badges you earned to prove how perfect your love is. And I'm sorry if my being _imperfect_ disappoints you. But I'd rather be myself, with all of my potential for darkness intact, than some super-powered magical messiah created out of your own selfish inability to parent your children. Which maybe you should try to actually do, because my brother and sister are probably the reason my daughter's going to die!"

With those words, Emma finally turns and leaves. Whale can fill them in on the dirty details.

* * *

AN: Regina's hypocrisy annoys me. It's so hard to like her character when she's just so self-centered; and now Emma is being written the same way.


	5. The Savior Heart

**CHAPTER FIVE**

 **THE SAVIOR HEART**

Emma finds Killian in their room, sitting on the edge of the bed holding her cigar box in his lap, the lid open and spilling out a pulsing red glow in the darkened room. It's a day of revelations, apparently. She isn't certain which of her secrets, her lies, is the most damning.

"I always knew that she wasn't mine," he says, not at all what she'd been expecting. "I knew you went to the cemetery that night with Whale. Back then I had a nasty habit of following you. I wanted... I can say that I wanted to protect you from harm, as is a man's duty, which I know you despise in and of itself, and I suppose it was more than that, some... want to control you. You were always so unpredictable, Swan, which was both exciting and infuriating."

"Like Milah?" she questions.

"Too much like her and in other ways nothing at all like her, but I chose not to dwell on either where I should have done," Killian states. "And so I suspected, but I hoped, and when I looked upon those blue eyes, for a time, I let myself believe she was mine. But she grew and so did her personality and though I could easily see you in her, there's nothing of me. When she started drawing, that's when I knew for certain she was Baelfire's child."

Emma has to her shut her eyes to blink back the tears. She remembers that clearly. Charley was three and somehow got into Henry's box of ink and quills. He'd been furious, of course, to find his little sister covered in ink, his quills broken, his half finished book about Agraba adorned with Charley's scribbles. They were very good scribbles for a three year old, all things considered, and rather than magically expunging the mess, Henry had copied the text to another book and left that one for his sister to draw in, something she'd continued since with increasingly refined talent such that Henry would promise her that when she was a bit older he'd hired her as his illustrator and they'd travel the world together.

"It was his mother's talent," she recalls and shakes her head.

"When did you take it out?" he asks, at last.

"After Charley was born," she answers. "Before you got back from your assignment."

"Removing one's heart doesn't eliminate the capacity to love," Killian recalls, "unless you let it."

"But it does make it easier," Emma sighs, taking a seat.

"Did you ever really love me?"

"No," she answers truthfully. "I thought I did, in the moment. Everything happened so fast. Between breaking the curse, Neverland, time travel, and becoming the Dark One, all I had time to process was the fear of losing more. I didn't even have the time to grieve for what I'd lost, and I don't just mean Neal. I had an entire life, and maybe it had a lot of pain in it, but it was my pain, it defined me. I started to forget that, though, caught up in the constant craziness and with my parents insisting that my life until I got to Storybrooke was just one giant suck-fest I needed to forget and start over so everything would be perfect. I think they genuinely believe that, and I _wanted_ to believe it. I was so tired of living with that pain. But not dealing with it... it was more like becoming an addict than actually healing. I just used all of these distractions to become desensitized to what I'd lost, what I would be giving up, and how much it scared me to give up those parts of myself that belonged to that world."

"So I was your rum," Killian surmises with a grimace.

"I'm sorry," she sighs. "I never meant to hurt you. I was trying so hard to believe in everything that my parents said I should. I wanted them to be proud of me and have some kind of connection with them, which just got so much harder after my brother was born. And naming him after Neal didn't help, then piling on everything with Lily and the Dark One... I just didn't want to deal with any of it. And I didn't want anyone to be disappointed in me. I was pretty sure that I could never disappoint you, not with this... unrealistic, perfect image of me that you were in love with, that you actually believed I was no matter what. I think... I loved that you loved me more than I actually loved _you_. Or I loved... the perfect version of you that you thought I made you. But both are lies, though. Neither of us are good people, Killian. And loving someone, good or bad, doesn't redeem you. It just... makes you codependent and stuck in some... self-made delusion of love and happiness."

Emma lets out another sigh, continuing, "I thought I could be your moral compass and that would be enough for both of us, but it was exhausting and my heart... I couldn't let the mess we were taint what I felt for my daughter. I might not have wanted another child, but once she was born... I had to protect her from what I became when I let you into my heart. From the darkness I took out of you and into myself. Maybe I did think that was love once, some kind of fated balance, but it's not. Love isn't making someone responsible for you being good. And it can never be changing yourself into someone _worse_ to make someone else better."

Killian doesn't say anything, but lifts her heart out of the box. There are patches of darkness, not in it like the usual way that darkness grows in hearts, but blotches on the surface like sun spots that she took into herself. As The Savior (and the Dark One) she could do it, she could fight it, but once the balance was restored and she was _just Emma_ , it became harder and harder and started to affect _her_ and her choices... choices like Charley.

"I don't regret having her," Emma says, "but I know that it was wrong. There was so much pressure to fall into step with everyone else that I didn't think or I didn't care enough how much I was hurting you. I'm so sorry for this charade, Killian."

He shakes his head, gaze forlorn. "It's a charade I allowed. I knew you had doubts. I pressured you when you were vulnerable, because I knew I had a chance that way to get under yours skin, to get into your heart. I called it love, but it wasn't. Not then. Not for a long time. And I knew... I realize that night in the cemetery that I hadn't won your heart at all. And it's impossible to challenge a ghost. My victory was a pyrrhic one. I got you to marry me, to pledge the rest of your life, but your heart would never be entirely mine, and the part that burned for him, however small, would always burn more brightly than the rest. He was the love of your life, and fate was unkind to you. I saw it as a kindness for me then, the opportunity to get what I wanted, and I pressured you, and I was unkind to him. And for that, Emma, I am sorry."

He then holds out her heart. "You may not be able to save the girl with magic, but she should have all of her mother's love with her."

She doesn't get much of a chance to argue the matter. He shoves it back in with the same lack of finesse she once returned her own.

* * *

AN: If Hook seems too nice and forgiving, there's a reason...


	6. The Warrior

**CHAPTER SIX**

 **THE WARRIOR**

It's been a week and Charley remains in a comatose state.

Emma has barely spoken to her parents, not since they demanded the story of her "affair" and seem to have found the lack of an actual sexual liaison even more disquieting. Straying during some moment of strife, of tension in her marriage, that was more excusable than being unable to let go of grief, of a lost love - even though her mother had _split her own heart_ to avoid such a fate.

But she's used to their hypocrisy by now.

Henry won't talk to her at all. They sit with Charley in shifts, and he has so far said nothing each time he arrives to relieve her, though at least the angry glares from the first week have subsided into something between ambivalence and apathy of her presence. She understands that she robbed him of something, a deeper connection to his sister that he deserved, and that there is nothing she can say to make it right.

Regina, at least, brings her food - food that she rarely touches - while making a snarky comment. It's her way of trying to show sympathy, Emma understands, because she otherwise doesn't really know how given the parents _she_ had. Emma doesn't have the strength to point out Regina's hypocrisy regarding romance and how her marriage is at least as big of a shallow sham as her own was.

Killian is gone.

When she'd returned to their bedroom, many hours after Charley's surgery, she'd found all of his possessions gone and a sheet of parchment stamped by some arch bishop that declared their marriage annulled. There was no official legal divorce in this world, not according to laws that were never altered to reflect life in Storybrooke, but annulments were allowed in cases of fraud.

Somehow the man who'd left her and her mother in a dungeon to starve to death had, legally speaking, become the victim of their tragic love story.

But the innocent child who looked as though she was under the spell of a sleeping curse was the real victim.

At the creaking of the door, Emma turns expecting to find Henry, but instead it's someone she has not seen in a very long time.

"I heard about your daughter's accident," Mulan speaks, her posture as rigid and proper as always even as she strides into the room.

"Then you've probably also heard about the rather abrupt end of my marriage," replies Emma with a sigh, amending, "You met Neal...?" She thinks that he had mentioned it, briefly, in Neverland, though she isn't certain.

"I did. We only knew one another for a few days, but it was clear that he loved you and your son deeply, that he wanted more than anything to find you and tell you much you meant to him. That was his biggest regret after leaving you," she recalls, "that he hid his true feelings for you until it was too late. He wanted very much to earn your forgiveness for his mistakes.

"I heard from Belle what happened upon their return here," she amends, "and I regret that I had left Robin's Merry Men to return to Shangri-La, or perhaps things would have been different."

"Aurora mentioned that you'd gone with Robin and his men," Emma tells her, eager to get off the topic of Neal, even though she was the one to ask. It pains her to hear from yet someone else how much he wanted to be a family and make up for leaving her. "I was surprised to hear that no one knew where you'd gone, so soon after you joined them."

Mulan grimaces slightly, a hand on the hilt of her sword as she speaks, "Robin Hood was not the honorable man he presented himself as when we met. While I hesitate to speak poorly of those within your family, I do not think he has a true understanding of 'honor'. It is just a word he and his men throw around that signifies nothing, and in a land that I have observed has so very little honor to go around, he has easily deceived those he claims to help - and himself. And in doing so assured that a woman who has killed many with impunity will never be held accountable. That is not honor. That is just another man, like so many men who call themselves great warriors, being lead around by the sword between his legs... or in his case, I suppose, arrow."

"So, what you're saying," Emma quips, too weary to put much sarcasm in it, "is that you don't care for Robin."

"As an acquaintance, I do not," says Mulan, "but as the 'soulmate' for a mass murderer, I cannot say that I have much objection. Any man willing to look past the murder of his wife to lay with her killer twice over deserves whatever misfortune he gets. I only feel sorry for the child produced by that incestuous threesome."

The next generation's probable rampaging magical lunatic, Emma thinks silently, as all evidence points to Zelena's child inheriting the same brand of certifiably crazy magic that was just _slightly_ less insane in her mother and sister. It won't surprise Emma if, in ten to twenty years, the creepy little redheaded _Children of the Corn_ reject and her birth mother plot to murder her father and adoptive mother/aunt... or perhaps just recast Zelena's time spell the next time some true love baby is born.

"I didn't just come here to offer my sympathizes," Mulan imparts and Emma raises a brow.

"I'm surprised you came even for that. If you think Robin is such a terrible person... I married a man complicit in the murder of hundreds of people who took Aurora's heart and left us for dead."

"We cannot help those we love," the warrior replies with guarded look, sadness in her eyes. "I too once loved someone who had not changed as I wanted to believe. And trusted another as a comrade-in-arms who did not fight for the equality I foolishly hoped would come of our friendship."

Emma doesn't have to ask of whom Mulan speaks. Though she had never known Philip until Storybrooke, the Aurora she came to know and respect has been nowhere to be found, it would seem, since she was reunited with her "true love". It had been easier to dismiss Killian having taken and used Sleeping Beauty's heart when she arrived in Storybrooke ten times as spoiled, cynical, and intolerant as she had been when they'd met. Philip had been no different, and learning that the pair had lied through their teeth to everyone about Zelena to save their own asses had forever tainted any respect Emma might have had for them. The couple seemed only to bring out each other's worse qualities, yet another example of true love being based on belief rather than actually exemplifying particular qualities and virtues.

 _This world_ , Emma thinks with a weary sigh, _is such a goddamned mess_.

"There's a lot I believed about my family - or wanted to believe - that's resulted in disappointment," admits Emma. "But I've disappointed them in turn. I rejected true love and deluded myself into thinking I could replace it with someone I chose simply because he would never see the damaged, imperfect failure that I am and leave. Which, of course, he did. And now I have parents who are disgusted by me, a son who can't even look at me, and a daughter who's dying, who'll meet her father in whatever comes after this life instead of in this one."

Mulan looks at Charley, regarding her for a long moment before proposing, "Perhaps there is a way to have both."

Emma's head snaps up. "What do you mean?"

"You know Aurora and I retrieved Philip's soul. There are different levels to the netherworld," she explains, "and though the living cannot pass into the true after life, there are legends of those who have been to a place called Wayland..."

* * *

AN: It was never explained why Mulan left the Merry Men in what amounts to about a week between her arriving at their camp and Robin and Company bumping into Regina and her dumbshit "wingman" stepdaughter. I can only imagine that Mulan soon learned Robin was about as honorable as Hook and heartbroken and dismayed returned to "Magical China" which is a nonsensical name for a place, so I went with Shangri-La.


	7. The Favor

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

 **THE FAVOR**

Killian is at a seaside tavern and already half drunk when Emma finds him well before "happy hour". He's not hard to find, flipping coins into an extremely busty woman's cleavage while aggressively flirting with a young bar maiden who's clearly been taking drinks for tips and is probably one more shy of passing out cold the way she's stumbling and spilling her pints of ale.

Pulling some coins from the sack at her belt, Emma hands them to the busty prostitute and orders her to take the drunk girl home while her virtue is still intact.

"Awe, come on, luv! I put a lot of doubloons and charm into- the pirate protests, before she turns to face him and push back the hood of her cloak. He back-peddles with, "Teaching her how to hold her liquor so she doesn't get taken advantage of."

Emma picks up the nearest stein of beer and throws the contents in his face. As he sputters a few of the other pirates in the tavern seem to consider coming to his defense, but then think better of it. Whether they're from Storybrooke or Blackbeard's former goons who never made it there, her face is recognized everywhere thanks to being a princess. It's not being a princess or even once married to one of "their kind" that stays their hands on their weapons, though. Everyone knows she was the Dark One once, and just as it is with Rumplestiltskin, rumors persist about how the demonic magical force permanently alters its hosts, what when it's _supposed to be_ that death is the only way to be free of it. She's used that fear occasionally to her advantage, much as it does not sit well with her.

This seaside red light district of debauchery isn't the sort of place for an upstanding lady to venture, even in daylight. But put on all black, some red lipstick, and a severe hairstyle that would send even the Evil Queen of the past running for the hills, and people of the Enchanted Forest won't fuck with you.

"I see you've had no problem reverting to your old self," Emma snaps as she slips onto the wooden bench across from him. She recalls their first "meeting" in a tavern like this one, when she was dressed as a busty maiden and trying to get him drunk, which was his tactic for getting laid. Somehow she'd been able to convince herself that the man from the past who probably raped women, that his future self had warned her about, was a completely different man from her lover. Maybe it was part of her own increasing disconnection from pre-Storybrooke Emma that had skewed her view of reality and how _people don't really change_.

"You're looking a little 'retro' yourself," Killian retorts. "On a warpath of destruction now that you're a free woman? You're welcome by the way."

Emma glares. "For granting me a legal right that I would have had if I hadn't gotten dragged into this patriarchal nightmare world that everyone else seems so delusionally fond of?"

"What can I say? People here have simple interests."

"Getting drunk, getting married, getting pregnant. Wash, rinse, repeat," Emma scoffs, then tells him, "I want to go to Wayland."

Emma doesn't need to ask if he's heard of it the way he tenses. It's probably a place all sailors have heard of going to back the time of Odysseus... which is maybe a concurrent time in a timeless world based on the Peloponnesian War; she tries not to think too hard on the parallel universe crap.

"Has Charley-"

"Not yet, but there's been no improvement," Emma cuts him off. "Mulan said that, perhaps, her soul had begun to pass on before Whale was able to internee, that it's trapped now. Mortality seems to work differently here."

"Magic doesn't like to give up the dead," Killian responds. "The Crocodile is right that it reigns supreme over science here. It's possible, but..."

"Will you help me then?" Emma asks. "You have the fastest enchanted ship-"

"You conned me into raising another man's child. You just sent my entertainment away and threw ale in my face."

"It's not a con if you were aware of it. Your entertainment would be considered statutory rape back in _my world_. And you never told me that Milah was Neal's mother. You also never told me you betrayed him to Pan to save your own ass with a side of spite at his rejection. As though any child would trust a man who lied to him for weeks, kept secret that he was his mother's lover - a criminal that she loved more than the child she abandoned.

"We might have wronged one another," she states, "but Baelfire did _nothing_ to deserve your betraying him as a a child _or_ your intentionally hurtful pursuit of me like some prize, just to take away someone else he loved, because damming him to that hell, alone, for centuries wasn't enough. Did you mean any of what you said before you left, or has alcohol just loosened the truth from your tongue?"

Killian looks away, half hiding his face with a large stein of ale. "I meant it. I was not a good man," he concedes, then corrects, "I _am not_ a good man. My bother's death was less a catalyst of change as it was finally freeing me from his morality and rigid adherence to rules under which I had been silently chaffing. I was always a pirate at heart. The sea was always my first love. And you were just a siren that enchanted me, made me believe I could be better."

"You deluded yourself over one kiss I never should have given you that was probably spurred on by a cloud of narcotic pixie dust," Emma scoffs. "And whatever man you are, he _still_ owes Baelfire. Neal died so his family had a chance, the family you tried to take from him like a condescending bully before he was even dead just to hold me up like a trophy. And for what? To double down on your spite at a _child_? No matter what I've done, you owe him, _you owe his family_ , and that includes his daughter, regardless of what you think of me."

* * *

AN: They both kind of suck in this story. Sorry about that. _Bad unconscious!_


	8. The World's End

**CHAPTER EIGHT**

 **THE WORLD'S END  
**

Emma feels as though she's thrust herself into a _Pirates of the Caribbean_ movie plot - or perhaps the plot was based on some lost writing of Walt Disney. Of course, there's no organ-playing squid Davey Jones, though her ex's father was, apparently, a massive asshole in keeping with the general tradition that everyone in this world must have at least one truly awful parent.

The seedy crew that Killian has acquired since his resignation from the navy are not remotely thrilled at the idea of sailing around the Cape of Dumarlone to the Dragonfields of Zorn, though having Ursula to guide their way appeases them some, and the mer-princess joins them aboard the _Jolly Roger_ for the most treacherous part of the journey.

They reach The Jaws of Zorn on the third day, the strange compass from Anton's vault pointing the way to jagged rocks that jut up from the surface of the sea, many laying just bellow depending on the tide and the cause of many shipwrecks, some of which still remain, the skeletal frames of broken ships protruding from their pierced resting places.

It takes a full day to traverse them, even with Ursula's help, and it's there that she leaves them, before a sudden rip tide yanks them forward and toward the roaring of a massive waterfall.

As with portal travel, the ship's enchantment keeps everyone aboard the ship, though just barely as they free-fall for what feels like minutes and plunge into the sea.

There's no sensation of actually submerging, however, just the strange ripple of magic as the ship breaks through, from one plain of reality to another.

The full moon has become a blazing hot sun and in the distance up ahead is a seemingly endless expanse of blinding white sand. The Dragonfields of Zorn, and somewhere beyond, Wayland.

Only Mulan accompanies her, her trusty enchanted sword in her grip. Emma carries Lily's dragon claw, and though there is no sign of any dragons when they set out, she quickly is relieved to have brought the talon as the sand ripples and they emerge like giant, wingless legged snakes, pale white and red-eyed with razor sharp teeth. For miles the magical reptiles stalk them but rarely attempt to strike.

When at last they reach the end of the salt flat they come to desolate mountains with an ornate door cut into the base. In a gloved hand, Mulan removes the wraith medallion that once marked Philip, and inserts it into a notch. Instantly the ruins illuminate and the door simply vanishes - though as soon as they pass through the empty space the sunlight is gone, the door soundly in place with the "key" rolling on the floor to rest against Mulan's boot.

She retrieves it as Emma's eyes adjust to a nightmarish fun house. Mirrors cover the walls, different shapes and sizes, as far as she can see... though there's no indication of how seeing is possible unless the mirrors somehow create their own magical light source. Her father once described his using a sleeping curse to reach her mother in the Burning Red Room from this place.

But they aren't going to the inter-dimensional chat room for post-traumatic sleeping curse suffers.

"If her soul is trapped here, it will be in one of these mirrors," explains Mulan as they walk. "Break the mirror and her soul will be released. You must be quick to capture it, or it may move on."

Mulan had already explained that part. She and Aurora had trapped Philip's soul in the medallion, since it had marked him. Emma has brought the swan keychain, because Belle had said it was enchanted by true love to traverse realms in spite of curses - but equally so because she had given it to Charley not terribly long ago when her daughter was feeling down, teased for the umpteenth time by her "cousins" that she wasn't brave or heroic like they were. Emma had given her the necklace and told her that it had been given to her "by someone who was very brave, even if it wasn't the bravery of fighting dragons and saving damsels in distress". He was brave because he loved more selflessly than anyone she'd ever known and gave his life so that many families could be happy."

Of course, her daughter had asked if he had been happy, if he'd had a family. She had to tell her daughter that once, he had been happy, for a short time, but fate had been cruel to him and he'd never truly gotten to have the family he deserved. It had become an unintended lesson that the heroes did not always win - that sometimes, for no good reason, they just threw their moral code out the window and became as selfish as the villains. As honest of a lesson as it was, it had broken Emma a little, remembering how starry-eyed and optimistic Henry was a child and managed to hang onto into adulthood - so much like his father. Charley had been cursed with her cynicism, her inability to look beyond the unfairness of life to see the hope for something better.

But Emma is trying. She is trying to have that hope, to cling to whatever bit of it might reside in the stolen trinket clutched in her hand.

She just has to have faith that it carries enough to bring her daughter home.

* * *

AN: This chapter started with such blatant rip-off of _At World's End_ , which wasn't even a good movie, IMO. Why do they keep making those movies? Johnny Depp in pirate clothes is not _that_ hot to overcome sitting through terrible movies. Damn it, Disney, stop being a greedy pimp and come up with something new!


	9. The Mirror of Erised

**CHAPTER NINE**

 **THE MIRROR OF ERISED**

The glass shatters and a luminous white smoke shoots from the shards, coalescing into one vaporous trail.

Mulan uses her sword to direct it toward Emma and the tiny pendant. At first, as the life-force swirls around her, she doesn't think it will work, but then the pendant glows and seems to suck the white fog into the metal sigil until the light winks out, leaving the pendant warm to the touch.

Breathless, heart pounding, Emma brushes away tears and hands the keychain and the claw both to Mulan, telling her, "Get this back to the ship. If I don't return before the next sunrise, you set course for home."

Any other person would have objected or inquired about being entrusted with the soul of a child, but Mulan simply nods and tells Emma, "Let your heart be your guide. It will not steer you wrong."

And then dark-haired warrior turns away and vanishes into the shadows of the labyrinth.

Left alone and with no magic in this realm, Emma continues through the hall of mirrors. She is searching for one different from the rest, spoke of in legends recorded in Belle's books that sounds something like the Mirror of Erised from _Harry Potter_ : it shows you what your heart most desires.

Mulan had claimed not see it, but the sad look in her dark eyes more than any super power suggests otherwise.

But Emma has no time to ponder what the stoic woman wants most when she must focus on the impossibility of her own heart's deepest longing.

She walks through many hallways that weave into one another, passes many mirrors, some harmless, some disturbing in the souls they contain. There's no way to know how many had come to be trapped in an attempt to find that one mirror and choosing one meant to deceive, how many are the victims of wraiths, and how many suffer here as a result of magic not meant for mortals to meddle with.

Just being here probably qualifies as the last.

Emma feels a bit like Indiana Jones with mirrors standing in for goblets, but it seems a reasonable trope to look for the most unassuming and simple looking glass.

So when at last she finds one small and speckled, propped against the stone wall without even a frame, she stands before it, unflinching, gazing deeply into the mist... which swirls and solidifies into a younger, bespeckled version of herself from that day in Portland, kissing a younger, leather-jacket clad Neal in a park - before everything went to shit. It's her last truly happy, fear-free moment, one she wants so deeply to go back to in order to change what happened next.

If her heart is pure enough, the legend said, she could pass into Wayland. If not...

She has to trust in herself, believe in her love. She hadn't that day in the forest or in Rumplestiltskin's storeroom of weird magic shit. But all of that fear and bitterness has long since leached away, replaced by love and longing.

Emma closes her eyes and steps forward to meet her reflection.

* * *

AN: Ah, the Mirror of Erised. Excuse me while I go on a _Harry Potter_ rant. Any one else see OutlawQueen like Ron/Hermione and CaptainSwan like Harry/Ginny? Even in the epilogue, Ron has zero actual respect or understanding of Hermione as person, and he never did anything really to make her fall in love with him other than _just exist_. And Harry's completely shallow and psychologically creepy Mary Sue romance with Ginny Weasley, a girl who is his mother's doppleganger, is oedipal complex wrong. One ship is about completely incompatible couples who don't really care about each other's basic personality traits because somehow they are just _fated_ to be together and being opposite is somehow supposed to be appealing. The other is about the main character and a tacked-on love interest with zero important backstory or depth of character who only appealed to Harry because she suddenly turned sixteen and got big boobies and then he pined for her for a year from afar and fantasized about marriage _even though he had all of five minutes of actually interacting with her_. And furthermore, if these people live to be 200 fucking years old, why are they _all_ getting married and knocked up at 20, pumping out kids like the Duggars? A decade on, and I am _still_ thoroughly disappointed in _The Deatlhy Hallows_.


	10. The Star Cave

**CHAPTER TEN**

 **THE STAR CAVE**

Wayland is not what Emma expects, though she's not entirely certain _what_ she had been expecting. It's a jungle much like Neverland - or perhaps a mental construction of the island as the further she walks, the more familiar it seems.

It takes a bit to get her barrings, and then she heads for the cave... which appears as she remembers it, which she increasingly suspects is quite literal here.

The door moves aside with the same scraping sound and everything within sits just where she recalls it when she stepped inside for the first time - including the coconut that Regina had joked was a colander. She has a flint and uses it to light the candle, filling the cave with simulated starlight.

"That's mine," a voice tersely objects.

Emma almost drops the coconut star map as she drops her gaze to the teenage boy who's seemingly appeared out of thin air brandishing a memorable cutlass that Charley found in her wardrobe once, hoping to learn to use to impress her "father" but ended up cutting herself instead.

"Give it back," teenage Baelfire demands.

Emma does so, carefully, as the boy continues to view her with suspicion.

This is not what she had been expecting. But then, the Cora that Regina had summoned turned out to be the young woman from years before her birth and there's apparently speculation that Wayland is somehow connected to .séance It's some sort of waystation where the dead, or some fragment of them, are pulled by the living. It's taking that fragment and pulling the rest along and back to the land of the living that's the hard, perhaps impossible, part.

"Are you with the pirates?" Baelfire asks. "Or did Pan bring you here for one of his twisted games? Did he tell you that I'm some dangerous traitor that has to be brought in?"

"No. I'm here to help you get home," Emma replies, but that doesn't strike the cord she hopes.

Baelfire moves the sword to her throat, his eyes pain-filled and terrified, like a cornered animal, even though she's the one with her back to the wall.

"I won't fall for such tricks again. He sent Rufio to pretend to be my friend. I may have wanted a friend, but I certainly don't want a mother after the heartless pirate's whore mine turned out to be."

The statement is as absurd as it is jarring, and it reveals so much about Neal. It makes Emma's heart ache for Baelfire and burn with guilt for essentially becoming the same pirate's whore - and that Neal had to watch as he lost her to a man whose selfish action trapped him in this place for _centuries_... She is a horrible person, Emma knows this, but she isn't doing this for herself. She's doing it for Charley, for Henry, for Neal... for _Baelfire_ who'd looked up at these stars every night dreaming of a family and home.

"I'm not working for Pan," Emma insists. "I came here for my daughter. My friend is getting her to our ship. She'd heard about you, that you were held prisoner here."

It's a half truth, and she thinks that he reads the partial lie, but he lowers his sword a bit and tells her, "You've got two minutes."

* * *

AN: Yeah, Emma, you'd better feel sorry, you pirate whore!


	11. The Betrayal

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

* * *

 **CHAPTER ELEVEN**

 **THE BETRAYAL**

Getting back to the ship with Baelfire is no small feat. Emma has to convince the boy to step through the strange mirror, which seems to take forever. He eventually entertains her story that she got to Neverland via a different realm, and his interest in seeing if The Dragonfields of Zorn are real place, rather than lore, is finally enough to get him to follow.

Though there's a moment after stepping through when she is terrified that he won't.

She's not allowed to look back until she's out of the strange labyrinth of mirrors, that's the rule according to Belle's books. It takes all of her willpower, though, not to just check when she can only hear her own boots against the ground. There is nothing but silence as her companion until she steps out into the desert, bathed in moonlight.

"I don't see any dragons," comes Baelfire's voice from beside her.

Emma almost weeps.

"You will. Stay close. I gave my talisman to my traveling companion. We may have to run."

"I'll manage," he says with a weariness beneath the boasting in his voice, "I've been running a long time."

 _Me too_ , she thinks, but instead she draws her own sword and they set out together as the sand begins to undulate and ripple like water.

They do end up running most of the way, ducking and weaving and being thrown about, reaching the shoreline as the sky begins to turn from black to a royal blue. There's an empty rowboat at the edge of the shore where the tide is retreating and Emma remembers Neal rowing her and Regina to Skull Island.

"You're strong," Baelfire compliments her strokes.

"Not in the ways I should be," she answers.

"You came all this way to get your daughter. And you risked your life for me, a stranger."

Emma shakes her head, grimly responding, "I've always been better at saving strangers. It's the people I love that I fail."

"It's the people you love that can hurt you the most," Baelfire states sagely, sounding far older than his physical years.

His words turn out to be prophetic as they reach the ship, hauled aboard by Mulan, and the teen sets eyes on Killian. Perhaps it was the darkness or that the _Jolly Roger_ still bears the colors of the Royal Navy on its hull that Baelfire failed to immediately recognize the ship of his stepfather and betrayer. Or maybe, given the long and strange route, he had ceased to consider the possibility.

His sword is instantly drawn and piercing dark eyes set upon the Captain and Emma with a snarl of, "LIAR! You said you weren't working for Pan!"

"I'm not!" Emma defends.

"And I'm not working for that demon child, Bae," says Killian.

"Don't call me that! You're not my father! You're a dirty pirate who beats up cripples and breaks up families for sport!"

"Baelfire-"

"YOU SOLD ME OUT TO THAT 'DEMON CHILD'!" the boy screams. "Do you have any idea what he does? Do you even care? I _trusted_ you!"

He turns to Emma again, his expression cold. "And I trusted you. Do you even have a daughter?"

"Yes," she cries.

"I want to see her," Baelfire demands.

But, of course, he can't. And she can't explain that her daughter is dead, that he's dead, and that she's trying to take their souls back with her.

"Please, Baelfire," she tries, "remember me."

A final, desperate move, she takes the swan keychain returned to her by Mulan and holds it out.

"You gave this to me. You said it represented our life together."

His expression is momentarily curious and he takes the chain, examining it, then with a spiteful look, chucks it overboard.

Emma lets out a scream and throws out her hand, the instinct to do magic that doesn't exist here. When it hits the dark water, Baelfire vanishes without even a wisp of purple smoke. Hysterical, Emma ties to jump into the sea, but Mulan holds her back as Killian orders his spooked crew to weigh anchor and make haste before the eminent sunrise traps them here.

A cloud of poppy dust takes Emma into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

AN: You didn't think she would succeed, did you? _Mwahahaha!_ Kitsowitz might play fast and lose with the "pure of heart" shit, but I don't. Emma should have known better.

 **To Mir who asked me about writing a _Harry Potter_ fic and anyone else wondering after my rant**: I left the _Harry Potter_ fandom a long time ago even if sometimes respond to Potterheads on tumblr and Twitter. I don't think I ever posted any HP stories, those that I started ending up aborted on hard drives of computers past. I don't think I could stand to get reinvested in that hot mess of cliche shippiness, teenage pregnancy, and perpetuation of intolerance that _Harry Potter_ became. I know there were some pretty good stories that addressed what went horribly wrong that came out in the years shortly after the final book, before I stopped reading HP fanfiction. And some that were just AU goodness. I think most of them were posted at **Portkey** and **FanfictionAlley**. Whenever I recommend HP fics, I always say **The Draco Series** by Cassandra Claire and **The Paradigm of Uncertainty Series/Sirius Series** by Lori; I think they are the two most iconic HP fanfictions and you can't consider yourself a true Potterhead fanfiction lover if you haven't read them. PoU ended years ago (not fully formed in the last chapters), and I have been in and out of a number of fandoms since, but it remains the Secretariat at the Belmont of fanfictions, leading the rest by so far they don't even register in comparison to how unnaturally good and published novel-like it is.


	12. The Price

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

* * *

 **CHAPTER TWELVE**

 **THE PRICE**

It's a half a day's ride from the port to the castle, back to the place where her daughter's funeral will be held. Failure threatens to consume her, to stop her horse and throw herself from the causeway, but Emma suspects that such a death would not find her reunited with her lover and child, and that's all that keeps her riding forward.

Her parents and son, so cold toward her when she left, are waiting, worried, distraught over the letter Mulan had sent off from the port regarding their departure. Her return, alone with a defeated set to her shoulders is explanation enough, and she breaks down into wracking sobs. They tell her that it's all right, that she tried, and perhaps it simply cannot be done.

The drawbridge shuts with a hollow _thunk_ as the sun slips past the horizon, leaving the feeling of being in a tomb as her family guides her through the cold stone hallways and up the stairs to Charley's room. There's still an I.V. hung from a glass bottle, but the other rudimentary medical equipment has been taken out. Without any nourishment, the small girl looks frail, her skin paper-thin and revealing the veins.

"I'm sorry," Emma weeps, and places a kiss on her daughter's forehead. There is no rainbow light.

* * *

 _"I'm sorry," Emma weeps, and places a kiss on her daughter's forehead. There is no rainbow light, only the rippling of the looking glass..._

Killian blinks once at his reflection in the mirror in his ship's quarters then turns back to face the woman who once preened herself in front of it. Milah stands off to the side with his heart in her hand and looking exactly as she did the day she was killed, right down her clothes.

Perhaps not exactly.

The cold and spiteful expression is gone from her face, replaced by the sadness of a tormented soul that has spent centuries in this harsh purgatory while watching the generations of destruction to her own family that began with a single choice in a tavern one night. She is not the woman he fell in love with and he is not the man who fell in love with that woman. But neither are they heroes for having realized the consequences of their selfish actions.

"How long?" he asks.

"Until my granddaughter's last breath."

The way things go in that family, he knows that could end up being more than decades before he's released from this hell and able to find whatever peace comes after, but Killian nods, because he never was a hero, not when everything he did was to win and keep the heart of another.

And, besides, even if it was Charley's snobbish aunt and uncle who dared her to climb that tower, the girl probably would not have fallen if she hadn't spied him shagging that chamber maid...

"Do it."

"It cannot be undone. Not here."

" _Do it_ ," Killian repeats, growling this time.

And so his original true love crushes his heart to dust.

There is no pain with the ending of life in the land of the dead, only awareness of the silence and stillness within.

* * *

AN: That was some kind of quasi-existentialist weird angsty shit _._


	13. The Return

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

* * *

 **CHAPTER THIRTEEN**

 **THE RETURN**

Henry comes forward and hugs Emma, saying nothing.

And then the strangest thing happens.

A chilly wind comes up, though the windows are all shut, and the flames in the hearth and wall sconces are all snuffed out.

For a moment all is quiet.

Then the flames roar back and Emma lets out a gasping, "Neal?"

He's standing by the door to the balcony dressed as he was when the enchantment on the Vault of the Dark One first tried to rip out his soul.

Henry runs to him first, slipping away from Emma who stands paralyzed in disbelief as father and son embrace, Henry now standing several inches taller, which is an odd sight.

It's Neal who comes to her, when Henry finally lets go, and she almost dares not touch him, afraid he will vanish again. But he is sold and his heart beats beneath her palm.

"How?" Emma trembles. "I lost you on the ship. You... you were just a boy and you disappeared."

Neal shakes his head faintly. "I don't know. But that wasn't real, not really. I was aware of it, and yet not. It's hard to explain, but Wayland is a realm of shades, of snapshots of a soul taken from a specific moment or time, not souls themselves."

"You receive the soul you need," Snow interjects with unexpected wisdom, reflecting on her possession by a young Cora, "not the one you expect to find."

From his jacket pocket then, Neal pulls out the swan necklace, bringing Emma to tears. "I saved this to give back to you."

"It's not mine anymore," she tells him, voice breaking, "it's your daughter's." Then she amends with an almost laugh, "It kind of _is_ your daughter, if it worked."

Fingers entwining, they move to Charley's bedside and place the chain around the pale girl's neck. At first it seems that it's failed, the soul once trapped in the charm lost, but as Neal brushes his lips over her forehead, there's another gust of wind, this one with a rainbow flash of light that first banishes the glamour cast shortly after her birth, and then-

Charley sucks in a breath and her eyelids flutter open, revealing her father's deep brown.

The little girl looks confused, inquiring, "Mommy? Why are you crying?"

"Because I'm happy, Baby," Emma chokes out, hugging her tightly while her gaze meets Neal's.

There is so much to talk to about. So much that has changed. And so much that hasn't changed as much as she once thought. She doesn't know how aware he's been of their lives since his death, and they'll need to discuss it all. But for the first time in a very long time, she feels like she can breath without a weight on her chest.

As Whale rushes in, late to the party and grumbling about the problems with magic while poking and prodding his patient, Henry staying at his sister's bedside lest the eccentric and sometimes alcoholic doctor frighten her, Emma steps off to the side a with Neal who remarks, "You know, you're older than me now."

"Does that bother you?" she asks, only a bit worried given his light, teasing tone.

"Nah, my old man might go for half his age plus seven, but I've got a thing for cougars."

Emma snorts back a laugh at the ridiculous comeback. And then she kisses him and doesn't stop until Charley proclaims, "Gross! Cooties!"

They part laughing, foreheads resting together a moment, taking in the insanity that has been their relationship.

Though it's still uncertain, Tallahassee seems once again possible. And right now, in this moment, it's enough.

END OF STORY

* * *

END NOTE: Glad that angsty shit is out of my system! Definitely no sequel for this hot mess! (Don't worry, Charley isn't paralyzed like Bran in _Game of Thrones_.)


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